The negative hero here is the poet, dramatist, and ‘bard’ Aleksandr Galich (19 October 1918-15 December 1977); for a contrasting view of his merits, see Alexander Galich, Songs and Poems, translated and with an introduction by G.S.Smith (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1983), and also G.S.Smith, Songs to Seven Strings (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984).

The poem takes off from ‘Khasbulat’, an old but well-known melodramatic vengeance ballad featuring stereotypical Caucasian tribal masculinity and mores. See http://www.russian-records.com/details.php?image_id=22500. The words are by a certain A.Ammosov, and the tune by the ethnographer Olga Khristoforovna Agreneva-Slavianskaia (1847-1920), both of whom are otherwise forgotten, their work in this case having ‘become folklore’. In the song, a prince asks Khasbulat, who is old and poor, to cede him his young wife in return for rich rewards, but Khasbulat responds that the day before he saw the couple together, and later stabbed her to death. The prince whips out his sabre and beheads the old man, and then jumps into the river and drowns.

Vladimir Propp (1895-1970), author of the classic The Morphology of the Folk Tale (1928, translated into English only in 1958) was still teaching at Leningrad University in the late 1950s, when Lev Loseff was an undergraduate there.

‘…once more I visited…’ is instantly recognisable to educated Russians as the opening phrase of an elegiac late poem by Pushkin; the last two sentences of Loseff’s poem refer to its valedictory ending.

‘This duel is appalling’ is a quotation from Chapter 50 of the novel The Hand (1977, published 1980; translation by Susan Brownsberger, 1989), by Loseff’s friend Yuz Aleshkovsky. ‘The Hand’ is the nickname given by Stalin to the direct-speech narrator, a veteran NKVD hitman.

Michel Foucault (1926-84) lectured (in English) at Dartmouth College on 17 and 25 November, 1980. There is an abundant online literature discussing these lectures.

The Petersburg critic Andrei Ar’ev has written: ‘… Loseff considered [existentialism] ‘the most interesting, important, and exciting’ phenomenon in the intellectual life of the twentieth century, regarding it as ‘broader than a philosophical school’. That is, postulating with some justice that existentialism was generated not only by philosophical thought, but also by the poetry of Rilke, the novels of Camus, the plays of Beckett, the films of Bergman, and so on. Postmodernism, a pestilence in philosophy unrelated to philosophical discourse, one that departed from striving for the transcendental in the direction of mere linguistic operations, disgusted him. Which is the subject of a late poem, with its expression, unusual for this poet, of plain revulsion for the newer thinkers, who are embodied for him in the image of ‘Foucault’. ‘Loseff the Unsentimental’, Zvezda, 6(2007), 134-9, reprinted in Лифшиц—Лосев—Loseff. Сборник памяти Льва Лосева, М., НЛО, 2017,149-61.

The celebrated literary thinker Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) was arrested with his informal circle of associates in December 1928, just after completing his Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art (published 1929), with its key concept of dialogism. He was exiled rather than imprisoned, first to Kazakhstan, then in 1936-7 to Saransk, the capital of the Mordovian Republic, about 400 miles east of Moscow; at the time its population was just over 50% ethnic Russian. In 1945 he went back and taught there at the Pedagogical Institute until he retired in 1961. He was in fact a valued Head of Department (Russian and Foreign Literatures) and teacher, and a highly productive scholar. In particular, his Rabelais and his World (as the first of his works to be translated into English was called in 1965; in Russian The Work of Francois Rabelais and the Folk Culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance), to which the first stanza of Loseff’s poem alludes, was largely written in Saransk. See N.L.Vasil′ev, ‘Mordovskii universitet v sud′be M.M.Bakhtina’ in M.M.Bakhtin v sovremennom mire (Saransk, Izd-vo Mordovskogo universiteta, 2016), 28-33, with abundant bibliography.

Yakov Emmanuilovich Golosovker (1890-1967) was an eminent philosopher and classicist, famous for his translations into Russian of Ancient Greek lyric poetry and German philosophers. He was arrested in 1936 and spent three years in Vorkuta; he was allowed to return to Moscow in 1942. The ‘yoke’ he is imagined to be wearing here refers to an extended metaphor in Chapter IV, ‘Thesis and Antithesis’, of Golosovker’s Dostoevsky and Kant (1963), where the philosopher’s antinomies (from the Critique of Pure Reason) are said to be ‘ingenious constructions made of four swinging yokes’. See A.V.Korovashko, ‘K interpretatsii stikhotovoreniia L′va Loseva “Bakhtin v Saranske”: Semantika i kontekst’, in M.M.Bakhtin v sovremennom mire, 200-202.